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Moving Your Customers From Awareness To Purchase (And Beyond)

CMO of Moving Targets, a national direct marketing agency combining veteran advertising tactics with modern technology.

At least once, you’ve probably been told, "You've got a lot of potential." At first, it feels like a compliment, someone recognizing something in you that you didn't see in yourself. The downside is being told you have potential implies you’re not actually good. Maybe tomorrow, but not today.

The same idea applies to social media fans: Just because your company has them doesn't mean they’re doing you much good. According to Syncapse, a
Facebook fan is worth $174. Yet companies don't really know how to monetize a fan. You need to use cross-media tactics through a sales funnel, paired with predictive marketing, to leverage your fans and effectively transform data to dollars.

Build Sales Funnels To Address Your Customers' Buy Cycle

Sales funnels address stages of a customer’s buy cycle with touchpoints, marketing channels and key metrics that go into a purchase decision. Supplementing your existing channels with this new level of precision creates better opportunities than with just predictive marketing. Algorithms built on data science help marketers make more informed business decisions. They can now use more accurate messaging and content that makes the most sense at different stages of their customer’s buy cycle, resulting in a lower cost per customer acquisition.

Predictive marketing optimizes content marketing. Instead of creating content for the masses, create targeted, focused and personalized content. Analytics help integrate data between platforms to create a common customer view to track interactions. Marketing initiatives now are more effective by integrating elements that resonate most with your prospects. When a lead advances to the sales stage, a complete prospect profile has been established, enabling you to target messaging to address a prospect's unique needs.

An example of a sales funnel is a Facebook ad that drives prospects to website content about two different services and monitors prospects’ interest via a pixel. The next stage offers more content of interest, like an e-book that requires a conversion from the prospect. Then you can remarket to them with additional ads.

Every decision made about how to create brand awareness, generate engagement, produce conversions and generate sales should be a reflection of your funnel. Social media marketing is about using content to maneuver prospects through a series of steps where you learn more about them so you can lead them to the actions you want: sales.

Use Social Media At Different Parts Of Your Sales Funnel

Our agency often uses Facebook’s lead generation ads at the top of our funnel. As a full-service, direct marketing agency focused on client branding and sales growth, we leverage print, email and social advertising, but we realize most of our ideal customers are on Facebook. In my experience, Facebook advertisements produce a lower customer acquisition cost than other social media platforms; the ability to target by behavioral and transactional data allows hyper-tuning of who sees our ads more than other platforms currently allow. Once a lead is submitted, our prospecting team determines if they should speak with a marketing consultant, or if they should continue to be nurtured by our content marketing strategy, shortening our sales cycle. This tactic has proven to be cost-effective in acquiring new clients because the ads are targeted by multiple behavioral characteristics.

By transforming information to insight using data science, you’ll gain an understanding of why and how to navigate prospects through your funnel. This information allows for a more objective view on the outcome of an ad. Facebook's newDeepText has the potential to further improve Facebook experiences by understanding posts better to extract intent, sentiment, and entities - people, places, events. Using mixed content signals like text and images enables marketers to not only target by interests and behaviors, but also by what is being talked about, even in private messages. This allows marketers to more precisely target their ideal audience by contextualizing keywords. Not only will marketers know you like a certain thing, but in what context you talk about them.

There are plenty of scenarios where social media fits in the middle of the sales funnel and starts the lead magnet stage where we capture all their contact information. Social media encompasses the full spectrum of the buying process, from awareness through advocacy.

Just as every brand is different, every potential buyer’s journey is as well. Start by analyzing your ideal buyer personas, based on profiles of your most successful customers, and the path you’d like them to take to reach your end goal. Create various types of content to appeal to conceptual, analytical, social and structural thinkers as well as different funnel areas. Conceptual thinkers gravitate to big ideas and theories, so provide them with intellectual, thought leadership-type content. Put the big ideas into perspective for analytical thinkers, providing data, stats and charts. Social thinkers relate more to real-life case studies, focusing on how they helped and on the teams behind the success. For structural thinkers, make the course of action very clear and succinct. By choosing key performance indicators for each segment of your funnel, you’ll be more effective in measuring and ultimately optimizing your results over time.

These metrics also help eliminate bias regarding decisions about which prospects to contact, on which channel, and with which message to appeal most to their needs. Data doesn’t necessarily mean dollars; conversion rates are only a metric in the grand scheme of learning how to give your customers what they want most. Your ideal conversion rate is where your sales funnel brings you the quality information needed to refine your message to earn more sales, repeat visitors and advocacy.

Marketing can be frustrating, it's not always clever copy, catchy images and then popping a bottle of pink champagne or a fine craft beer in celebration. Creativity is the fun part. Metrics is more like the work part, enabling you to adjust on the fly when your strategy isn't working, or kick it up a notch when it is. After all, it's not the size of your data, but how you use it that really makes an impact on your ideal buyer’s journey from interest to purchase.